Results of a 1.5 year academic publishing experiment

I
just wrote
about
two articles published based on my MA
thesis about Chinese Open
Courses, and this inspired me to look at some of the download statistics
from my website. Back in 2008, I wrote about the idea of a "Fair Trade"
symbol for
research,
and the idea the research ethics shouldn't stop with the actual
research, but should include requirements to make your research Open
Access, and make it available in appropriate formats for the researched
audience (language, etc). I began this process by having my
undergraduate thesis translated into
Indonesian,
but with my MA thesis, I wanted to go further.

Publishing formats

My thesis is licensed under the Creative Commons BY
license, which allows
others to modify and build upon your work. However, it is very difficult
to modify a work that is in a non-modifiable file format. Therefore, I
wanted to release my thesis in a format that was modifiable - in this
case, I chose Word DOC, RTF and Open Document
Format (ODT) to cover all
cases (it's trivial to generate several formats from the same program).

Some people like to print out long documents for ease of reading. The
standard way of formatting an MA thesis, with double line space and
generous margins, is great for editing and annotation, but not ideal for general reading. So I created another version, with two columns, wider
margins, and single line spacing (this was also available in all the
formats listed above).

E-book readers are also becoming more and more popular, and are
especially well-suited to long form reading like theses. It is usually
possible to shoe-horn a PDF into one of these, however it doesn't look
pretty, and you loose certain features, such as table of contents.

I generated epub and mobi versions of the thesis, suitable for Kindle,
iBooks and most other devices. I also tried to make the book available
on Kindle as a self-published book, but Amazon will not allow free
self-published books, and I didn't want to charge for one version, while
others were free. (I did publish to SmashWords, but they messed up the
Chinese characters).

Once I had the Chinese translation ready in July, 2011, I also posted
several versions of this, including PDF, Word, RTF and ODT

Other dissemination methods

In addition to posting the files, I decided to experiment with
syndicating the thesis on my blog. This had two purposes. First, I
personally often end up downloading a lot of long documents, without
ever getting around to reading them. However, if you "drip feed" me
information over many days, I am much more likely to absorb the
information.

The other point was to give each individual "piece" of the thesis an
individual URL, so that people could link
to it. In addition to making a main point, every thesis probably consists
of a number of logical "pieces", which have some value in themselves.
There is the overview of Chinese higher education history in the lit
review, there is the section on a commercial ecosystem around open
courses in China, etc. Now, other blogs or websites which want to refer
to these pieces can link directly to them rather than saying "look up
page 50 in this PDF". (Having individual URLs also makes it much easier
to tweet and retweet links).

So I posted the thesis on my blog progressively over a period of months,
always tweeting out links as well. Some of the blog posts got a number
of retweets and were also mentioned in other blogs on OER.

I also uploaded my
thesis
to T-Space, the University of
Toronto repository, as we are obliged to do according to the policy of
the university, and also uploaded it to Google
Books.

Statistics

So after almost 1.5 years, what do the numbers look like? I use both
AWStats and Google Analytics to analyze my traffic - neither is perfect.
AWStats often overreport hits, because of all the referral spam, however
Google Analytics does not capture PDF downloads at all. I also think the
download numbers are far less exaggerated than the page hits. So I
looked up the download statistics for the last 1.5 years to see which
files were most downloaded.

In total, my thesis has been downloaded 2.600 times.

Language

Downloads

English

2132

Chinese

458

Format

Downloads

PDF

2132

DOC

458

RTF

398

ODT

121

ebook

158

In
addition, the thesis got downloaded 29 times from T-Space. This seems
incredibly little, but in this particular case, it is not very
surprising. First, it was only published several months later on
T-Space, because the university waits until convocation before releasing
the documents. At this point, many of the downloads from my website had
already happened. Also, because I released so much information from my
own website, anyone searching for my thesis would find links to my
website, instead of T-Space. I think T-Space is a good option for
students who do not have an active web presence, but its clear from
these statistics that T-Space does not promote browsing and exploration
(not strange, given its quite convoluted design).

I also got very low numbers at Google Books, again probably because my
other files came up much higher in searches. (In contrast, I got quite
high reading numbers for my undergraduate honors thesis on Google Books,
particularly the Indonesian version).

Non-numeric outcomes and the future

These numbers by themselves don't necessarily mean all that much, they
don't tell me how many people have read the thesis, or how many people
found it useful. But it's quite interesting to see, for example the
distribution of file formats (despite the fact that it's so easy to
generate multiple formats that even if few people download them, a case
could still be made for making them available). In addition to pure
numbers, I have connected with many interesting people, and met people
at conferences that I didn't even know who told me "I followed your
thesis with interest". I even had an e-mail from a journal editor
inviting me to turn my thesis into a paper for his journal.

I hope this post has inspired you to think about how you publish your
own research, whether it's your MA or PhD thesis, or you are further in
your academic career. I certainly don't think what I did is the
definitive answer, and I would love to see what others can come up with.
For my PhD thesis, I am not waiting until my thesis is released, I built
a system to enable me to
take all my working notes in the public and
hopefully, when my thesis is released, every single citation will link
back to the notes I took when I first read that paper.